Culture platforms and Switzerland Tourism commit to open data
- Advocacy
- Event Data
- Tourism
On 12 December 2023, at the request of Swiss cultural platforms, a meeting took place with Switzerland Tourism. Besides representatives of regional culture calendars, Guidle, Switzerland Tourism’s contractor for event calendars, also took part in the exchange.
The culture calendars put forward the demand that, in the interest of event organisers, operators of event calendars should henceforth follow the once-only principle: ideally, organisers enter the information on their events on one platform; data released accordingly is offered to other platforms in the network via an open interface for automatic takeover. For copyright-protected content, the terms of use are supplied in the form of standard licences. This eliminates transaction costs for the secondary use of content (e.g. archives, use by artists).
After in-depth discussion, the participants concluded that cooperation is fostered if uniform conditions for data exchange apply to all platform operators. This requires all participating platforms to apply the following two principles:
- All event data released by the person entering it is made available for secondary use via an open interface (provided the rights holders are willing).
- All event platforms exchange event data with one another via interfaces, so that the multiple entry by organisers that is common today gradually disappears. No additional costs are charged to the participating platforms or to those entering the data for this data exchange.
The association Opendata.ch, in cooperation with the event platform Hinto, is now setting up a monitoring system to review the implementation of the agreed measures.
Clarifying questions about data supply chains and source attribution, as well as efforts to harmonise data structures, will be tackled in a further step. So will raising awareness among organisers and those entering data.
Further details can be found in the following documents: